


All the Pretty Flowers, How They Wasted Away

by hazel_3017



Series: All the Pretty Flowers [2]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Gen, Grief, Light Angst, Miscarriage, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Third Person, mention of MPREG
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 11:26:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4390019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hazel_3017/pseuds/hazel_3017
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A companion piece to All the Pretty Flowers, How Good They Smelled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Pretty Flowers, How They Wasted Away

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: This is a piece of fiction

Sidney doesn’t smile anymore.

He doesn’t cry either, doesn’t rage and scream about the unfairness of it all. He could; no one would blame him for it, but he never does. 

Pascal sort of wishes that he would, wishes  _he_  could do it for him–-anything but the fragile silence, so fraught with tension and grief that Pascal feels as though he’s walking on egg shells, afraid he’ll take a wrong step and Sidney will–-

Break, maybe. Even more than he already has.

Pascal feels helpless. He doesn’t know what to do or how to make this better. Doesn’t know that anything can.

He’s never seen Sidney like this before; he’s seen him hurt and angry and frustrated and even sad, but nothing like this.

He’s broken, rendered mute by his grief; it chips away at him, day after day, and Pascal is terrified that one day he’ll stop by Sidney's house and there will be nothing left of him, that Sidney will have wasted away into nothingness. Broken beyond repair.

“Tell me what to do,” he asks, only once, because Sidney says, “give me back my child,” and Pascal can’t. 

He can’t rewind the clock no matter how much he wants to.

“I’m sorry,” he says. It doesn’t make either of them feel any better.

*

Nothing does.

*

Marc-André watches Sidney go down behind his own net. He scrambles to get to him, hindered by the heavy goalie gear he’s wearing, and by the time Marc-André reaches him, Giroux is already there and the ice is coloured red with blood.

Geno shows up a second later--and he must have jumped the boards as soon as he saw Sid go down, he’s there so fast.

He’s telling Sidney that he’s fine, that everything will be okay.

Marc-André shares a look with Giroux before looking down at the blood, pooling around Sid’s body and growing bigger by the second.

He doesn’t know what’s wrong, he doesn’t know what is happening, but as Sidney is carried off the ice, he knows he’s not okay. He is not fine.

*

He won’t be for a long time yet.

*

Ian can’t bring himself to visit.

He wonders if Sidney notices, if he cares. He wonders if he’s glad.

It’s Ian’s fault, after all, that he lost his child. It’s Ian that crashed into him so hard the impact had him crashing to the ice, his legs giving out from underneath him from the force of the hit.

It was an accident, but that doesn’t make Ian any less responsible. At least not in his eyes. He’s at fault for the miscarriage, and he doesn’t know how to deal with that. Doesn’t know how he can ever look Sidney in the eyes again without flinching, without Sidney looking back at him and reading the truth in Ian’s face.

_I killed your baby._

Ian has done the research. 

They had estimated Sidney to have been eleven weeks pregnant when he miscarried. Eleven weeks. At that stage the baby would have had fingers and toes, would be ready to grow fingernails.

When he closes his eyes, Ian can picture it so clearly. Ten little fingers and ten little toes, all gone. Because of him.

How can he ever make amends for that? How can he ever expect Sidney to forgive him?

*

He can’t, but Sidney will anyway. 

Eventually.

*

Kris gets off the phone and has to take a moment. He closes his eyes, forcing himself to breathe through the fear and anxiety–-through the frustration of not being able to  _do_ anything. To help in some way.

“Kris? Is he okay? Is he–-”

He opens his eyes to find Cathy staring at him with worried eyes. She looks about as scared as he feels.

“All that blood,” she says. Her nails are digging into his arm; Kris doesn’t even feel it.

“He had a miscarriage,” he says, “the blood, it was-–” He breaks off, choking on a sob. He remembers watching on the television as Ian crashed into Sid, remembers watching Sid go down and stay there. They hadn’t known what was wrong, and then the blood–-Kris had thought Sid was dying. He’d been stuck in Pittsburgh and Sid might be-–

“He was pregnant.”

He’s crying, tears escaping his eyes in torrents as he tries to catch his breath. “He was pregnant. He was going to have a baby and now–-”

Cathy pulls him close. She wraps her arms around him, offering what support she can. They stand there for what seems like an age, just crying together. They cry for the child that is no more, and they cry for Sid, whose pain Kris can’t even begin to imagine.

He can’t sleep that night. He turns restlessly in bed for a couple of hours before he can’t take it anymore.

He’s quiet as he sneaks out of bed, doesn’t want to wake up Cathy. One of them should get some rest.

Alex is breathing peacefully when Kris enters his room, and something settles inside of him. An unease falling away now that he can see his son, can see that he is alive and well, is breathing like he should.

Kris walks over to his little bed. He crouches down, placing his hand over Alex’s chest and lets it rest there as it moves up and down with every breath his son draws; every inhale the sweetest sound Kris has ever heard.

He wonders, just for a second, what he’d do if anything ever happened to Alex. If Kris lost his child like Sidney had, would he be able to handle it? Would he ever find the strength to move on?

Kris doesn’t know that he could. 

*

Sidney will. He’s always been stronger.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on [tumblr](http://hazel3017.tumblr.com/).


End file.
